Medium

Medium takes a shortclip from Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), showing an actor blowing a smoke ring, stretching its length from 2 seconds to 3 minutes.

The impossible duration of the exhaled breath suggests an alternative timescale, removed from both human and filmic rhythms. The fixed frames underlying cinematic motion are dissolved into malleable information that can be divided into ever-finer increments, blurring the divide between stillness and motion. The majority of this extended scene was never caught on film, yet it's impossible to tell which are the original recorded frames and which are the ‘phantom’ frames created by software algorithms.

The viscous smoke spilling out of the actor’s mouth resembles the ‘ectoplasm’ associated with 19th Century spiritualist photography. This era’s ambiguous relationship between ‘real’ and imagined worlds marks a transition period where new technologies supposedly opened up zones previously invisible to the human eye. This work suggests a similar transition between 20th and 21st Century media.